Death by Chocolate Ladyfingers

Book 9: Death by Chocolate Mystery

by Sarah Graves

Genres: Culinary Cozy Mysteries; Mystery; Animal Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

The townsfolk of Eastport, Maine, know the best place to satisfy their sweet tooth is at Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree and Ellie White’s bakery, the Chocolate Moose. But some people living in the island town have more sinister appetites…

As the sun sets on summer in Eastport, local celebrations are in full swing—and Jake and Ellie have their hands full supplying the most decadent of desserts for Eastport High School’s Class of ’97 reunion. Unexpectedly, the gathering includes ex-spouses, Cindy Munson and Terry Lawson, seemingly reunited as a family with their precocious 6-year-old daughter, Ivy. But when Cindy’s body is discovered murdered in Lawson’s car that night, suspicion immediately falls upon the tech-financier, who was once also Eastport High’s most notorious school bully.

As the evidence stacks against him, Terry becomes the prime suspect, leaving young Ivy in the care of child services. Remembering her own experiences in foster care, Jake volunteers to look after the little girl while conducting her own investigation into the night of the dance with Ellie.

But someone doesn’t want the amateur sleuths digging up past, humiliating secrets that may point to vengeful present-day motives—even if it means adding Jake and Ellie to a killer’s body count . . .

Release date: April 28, 2026

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

Grrr.

At the sound, I shot out of bed so fast that my feet hit the floor before my eyes were even all the way open.

Grrr. Beside me in the darkness, a large, unhappy German shepherd dog growled again, in full alert mode and ready to roll out a complete set of sharp choppers.

“Wait,” I breathed, still working on figuring out what woke her while also trying to slow my heart rate. It felt like a hamster was running on an exercise wheel in there.

The dog whined anxiously. “It’s okay,” I murmured, hoping the next few moments wouldn’t make a liar out of me, as I tiptoed toward the bedroom doorway and peeked out. Thin bluish light from the streetlamp outside seeped through the gauzy curtains at the hall window.

Peering past me down the stairs, Fala growled again. This time it was no more than a throat clearing, but from the hairs stiffly raised on her neck, I knew she’d moved on to the lemme-at-’em portion of the program.

“Easy,” I cautioned. The banister was cold under my hand. Fala came down the first few steps with me, then squinted again into the velvety darkness of the downstairs hall.

“Wuff,” she said. I wanted to think that she’d startled awake at the sounds of a raccoon plundering a trash can in the alley.

But in the island village of Eastport, Maine, three hours from Bangor and light-years, it often seemed, from anywhere else, we had wild animals galore. Deer, the occasional moose, foxes, and coyotes—even a bear that swam over from the mainland once, and none of them had ever woken her.

“Okay,” I told her again, as we padded toward the kitchen. When I snapped the wall switch, the fluorescent ceiling fixture flickered on, revealing its beadboard wainscoting, the tin ceiling pressed in an acorns-and-grape-leaves pattern, and the scuffed hardwood floor with bright rag rugs scattered across it.

On the table were a green glass jug full of orange-berried bittersweet twigs, a frog-shaped cup stuffed with pencils and pens, and this week’s Quoddy Tides, the “Most Easterly Published Newspaper in the US.”

All just as usual, in other words. By now, Fala’s neck hairs had smoothed, and my internal alarm bells had quieted, too. Or almost: my big old house on Key Street—twelve rooms, four chimneys, forty-eight old double-hung windows with green wooden shutters—was ordinarily so loud, busy, and overfull, you’d think a hostel for noisy and hyperactive persons was being run here.

But now, it was very quiet. “False alarm,” I told the dog. “Thanks a lot, I really needed a midnight wake-up call.”

Now that we were up, though, I thought I might as well take her outside again real quick. A couple of steps from the porch to the lawn ought to do it; I turned to the row of hooks in the back hall for her leash and stopped abruptly, staring at the back door.

Which stood open. But I’d locked it, I’d definitely …

My husband, Wade Sorenson, was away for two weeks, working. My elderly dad and stepmother were enjoying a rare trip on their own, a bus tour of northern Maine. My son, Sam, his wife, Mika, and their three little kids were in Portland having the baby’s ears looked at: in the matter of my youngest grandson’s possible deafness, the jury was still out.

All of which meant I’d been nervously alone in the house for three days now, and as a result, there was no way I’d left that door open. So how …?

I stepped out onto the porch, where the sharp smells of saltwater and fallen leaves rode a chilly breeze. A foghorn moaned somewhere, and it was very dark. Fala whined for me to come back in, but then a new thought hit me: whoever had opened that door might still be in the house.

So, there I stood, barefoot and shivering in a flannel nightgown and nothing else. The breeze stiffened, scattering more leaves. Bell buoys clanked in the distance, and that foghorn sounded again while I hesitated.

But then Fala yelped, and suddenly I forgot all about being scared—so there was someone in there.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” I grated out, yanking the door open. No dog was in sight; no one else, either. “Fala?”

Don’t you dare hurt my dog … I grabbed up a stick of firewood from the basket by the stove. “Oh, Mis-ter Prow-ler,” I sang out a little wildly, “I’m coming to clobber you!”

In the dining room I snapped the lights on. “Fala?” The old gold-medallion wallpaper glimmered in the glow of the cranberry-glass lamps on the tables. I yanked the draperies back: no one.

Next came the front parlor, with its comfy upholstered chairs, tiled hearth, and grated fireplace; then the sun room, full of wicker and potted greenery: nope and nope.

Finally, I started upstairs. “All right, whoever you are, get out of my house this instant or I’ll set the dog on you and then I’ll beat you to death.”

Which I wouldn’t have, of course, but given the chance, I’d have gotten a few good licks in—by then, I was pretty mad. “I’m warning you …”

Fala appeared suddenly, shot up the stairs past me, swung left, and ran for my office, a tiny cubbyhole with a desk, a chair, a space heater, and a lamp. The shuffling sounds coming from in there stopped abruptly as I paused outside the door.

“Shh,” I told Fala quietly, putting a finger to my lips. The room held tax records, insurance papers, the household checkbook, and so on, along with some rarely used items that I nevertheless found indispensable when I did use them: Night-vision glasses. Camouflage jacket. A Swiss Army knife and a set of lock-picking tools, including several that I’d made myself. And secured out of sight in a gun safe on the top shelf—we had children in the house, after all—a .38-caliber Police Special semiautomatic pistol, loaded and ready.

I opened the office door. Fala lunged past me as something moved in the gloom. I swung the stove wood, feeling a jolt of glee in the moment before impact. Gotcha!

But then there wasn’t one—an impact, I mean. Instead, the shape did a weave-and-a-bobble worthy of a Hollywood stunt man and slipped right by me.

“Fala, stay,” I said sharply, as footsteps pounded down the stairs and along the downstairs hall before slamming out the door. From the upstairs hall window, I caught a brief glimpse of a dark figure running away down the street.

And I know I should have called the cops right then—of course I should have. But it was so late, I was tired, and they would insist on coming over just to have a look around, even though the intruder had already vamoosed.

Tomorrow. I would tell them tomorrow, I thought, a decision made easier by the untouched state of the tiny office once I got the lamp turned on: nothing taken or disturbed.

A file drawer opened, that was all. And no one hurt, which reminded me. “Fala?”

Her head popped up alertly. By some blessing, she’d stayed by me the way I asked instead of racing after the intruder. Even now she could probably have caught him—eaten him, too. But that would’ve exposed me to the Lawsuit That Ate Chicago, dog-bite edition. German shepherd dogs were like catnip to personal injury lawyers, even ones representing burglars.

So, I didn’t let her out after him, and I didn’t call the cops, either. Instead, with all that high-test adrenaline draining suddenly from my system, I felt as if all the blood had been let out of me.

Woozily, I put a hand out, found the end of the old cast-iron radiator, and clung to it. It seemed clear that I could either (a) sit down, pronto, or (b) throw up and pass out cold, ideally in that order.

Fala looked up at me as if to say, Couldn’t we just get back into bed? Because she was pretty confident that the trouble was over now—and could she also bring her toy?

A pink knitted snake with a bell in its tail dangled from her mouth. “Yeah, come on,” I told her. “That’s a great idea.”

Back in the warm, dark bedroom, I padded to the window and stood by it for a long moment, looking out, but nothing budged. I was turning away when the dark-green shrubbery across the street started moving, its branches waving this way and that.

The old white-clapboard house over there was nearly the twin of mine: three floors plus an attic, lots of chimneys and windows, built for a sea captain back in the early 1800s. Now a figure crept stealthily from the yard’s untidy greenery, up onto the porch steps. Watching, I was just about to reverse my not-calling-the-cops stance when whoever it was dug in his pocket, produced a key, examined it carefully under the porch light, and let himself in, closing the door behind him.

I let my breath out. It was only our longtime neighbor, Wally Bean, entering his own home late at night. Sneaking in, actually, or so it seemed to me—but that was none of my beeswax.

Wally wasn’t the sharpest hook in the tackle box, and he wasn’t good at keeping those shrubberies trimmed, either. But he was certainly no brazen home invader, and by the time I got back into bed I’d forgotten all about him.

Settled beside me, soon Fala snored peacefully while I lay wondering: An intruder had gotten in just now, but how, and why? If the reason was burglary, easy pickings were plainly in view downstairs—my dad’s framed silver-dollar collection, the spare change jar.

So maybe my intruder was after something specific, or—a less comforting thought—wasn’t here to steal anything at all.

Maybe something else motivated him, though I couldn’t think what. The people who once might’ve wished me harm were all in my past, and most of them were dead.

Finally, after a few hours of dozing, I got up again and dragged myself back to the window. To the east, the sun’s red edge peeped over the watery horizon, flooding the sky with pink. Gritty-eyed and now too wide awake to bother trying for more sleep, I hauled some clothes on and went downstairs, with Fala galloping ahead of me.

I’d set up the coffeemaker the night before. Now I inhaled the hot brew’s intoxicating fragrance like a vampire smelling blood. But the woodstove was cold, no Top 40 radio blared, and no little children still in pajamas slopped spoons into bowls half-full of milky cereal, bored with eating and ready to romp.

Somehow mornings just weren’t the same when the kitchen didn’t resemble a circus train arriving at a Red Cross feeding station. Then the phone rang and it was my friend and business partner, Ellie White.

“What’s wrong?” were her first words when I’d answered. To anyone else I’d have sounded fine, but she knew me pretty well.

“Interesting night,” I said. “Okay now, though.” I could practically hear her eyebrows rising. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get there.”

Ellie and I owned a small chocolate-themed bakery called the Chocolate Moose, on Water Street, across from Eastport’s busy fishing harbor. Today, as on most days, we’d be there together.

“You’re okay, though? You sound—I don’t know.”

Funny how a person can get used to other people being in the house 24/7. I looked around the empty, quiet kitchen, where the only sound was Fala crunching her kibble.

“I’m fine,” I lied. In the background Ellie’s husband, George Valentine, said, “Tell her she can come over here.”

Ellie’s guest room was private and pleasant, and Fala was welcome. But no way was I going to be driven from my own place by a case of nerves, especially since in the worst-case scenario I did have that .38.

“Tell George thanks,” I said. “But they’ll all be home soon. And Fala’s here. She’s good company.”

I looked down at the dog, who by now had nearly separated the bell from the snake’s tail. Crouching, I grabbed the snake, yanked off the bell, gave back the snake and pocketed the bell.

“If you say so.” Ellie didn’t sound convinced. “But listen, remember to bring the tote boxes when you come down, will you?”

We used the big plastic boxes for transporting finished baked goods, and today we had plenty to transport. I said I’d bring them, and then, carrying the phone, I unlocked and opened the brand-new breezeway door that led out to the backyard.

We’d installed the door weeks earlier, specifically to make putting dogs outside easier. Now Fala hurled herself through it and made a beeline for the orange rubber ball she’d spent the summer disemboweling.

Even though we still used a collar and leash when it was dark out (see wildlife, above), fencing the yard, I thought, as I watched her cavorting out there, was the best thing we’d ever done. Then I looked down.

“We’ll need them first thing,” Ellie was saying into my ear, “for the class reunion’s pastry order.”

“Right,” I said distractedly. The four dozen chocolate eclairs we’d prepared the day before would just about fill those totes, I guessed as I bent to squint at the breezeway door’s new brass hardware, glinting in the early sunshine.

It was a standard exterior-door lockset, put in a few weeks earlier along with the door itself. Now the lock surface bore scratches fine as hairs, made, I was pretty sure, by a tool like the ones I kept with the gun, the goggles, and the camo jacket.

Fascinating. “Jake?” said Ellie. “You still there?

“Uh-huh.” I touched the scratches. “Yeah, I’m here.”

The marks hadn’t been on it when the lock was installed. I knew because I’d installed it. I knew, too, that my visitor had come in by the porch door and exited the same way. I’d seen it standing open, heard it slam when he went out.

But now with the new lock hardware scratched in a way that I recognized too well, I understood that last night wasn’t the first time someone had tried getting into the house.

Just the first time they’d succeeded.

My name is Jacobia Tiptree—Jake to my friends—and when I first came to Maine, I had a twelve-year-old son, a car trunk full of cash, an awful soon-to-be-ex-husband, and a price on my head, courtesy of some thoroughly villainous New York City guys who didn’t want me ratting them out.

I’d worked for these guys, counting their ill-gotten gains and investing them in all the right places. Also, I knew where the money had come from—the gory details, in other words, all of which I could be made to reveal if the cops grabbed me up.

And they were about to. Thus, my hasty departure. The cash in the trunk, at least, was mine. I’d earned it, and the wages of sin back then were pretty good. But I’d never get to spend it if I didn’t vamoose out of Manhattan, like toot sweet.

So I did, ending up a few days later in Eastport, Maine, near the Canadian border. Tiny, remote Eastport was a good place to be when the world ended, I soon learned, since if you lived here, you wouldn’t even hear about it for another ten years.

Now, nearly two decades later, I had a grown son with a wife and children of his own, my awful ex-husband was not only my ex; he was also dead, and as far as I knew, there was nobody looking to blow my head off.

La dolce vita, in other words, the occasional housebreaker notwithstanding. After Ellie and I hung up, I opened the kitchen woodstove, built a tepee of newspaper and kindling inside it, and lit it. Yellow flames went up with a whoosh and a puff of warmth, and suddenly the house didn’t feel so empty anymore.

Next, I went around checking windows and wedging a chair under the knob of the door to the backyard, sliding the deadbolt on the cellar door, and making sure the front door key was not in fact under the doormat where Sam often left it.

Maybe I was overdoing it, but better safe than sorry is my motto in all housebreaking and lock-picking situations. By the time I had all the plastic totes carried out to the driveway and loaded into the car, that old house was locked up tighter than the air hatch on the International Space Station.

The car was an old Fiat 124 Sport Spider, with five speeds forward, rack-and-pinion steering, double overhead cams, and a radiator that spewed hot water all over the inside of the engine compartment for no good reason. With an apricot paint job, wire wheels, and a black cloth convertible top now latched in the open position, the car looked expensive, impractical, and as if its rubber timing belt might snap regularly and without warning.

Which it did. I kept spares in the glove box.

Fala leapt in and settled. I clipped her harness to one of the seat belts I’d had put in, fastened mine, and turned the ignition key.

The engine coughed once as I finagled the touchy gearbox into reverse, then settled to a throaty grumble as we backed out onto Key Street. Downhill toward the bay, the blacktop steamed where sunshine warmed the wet pavement. Fog remnants floated in the shade of yellow-leaved maples and sparkled in the grass.

As we turned onto Water Street, the bay came into view, busy with foam-topped waves. Past the Peavey Library, Eastport’s two-story brick or wood-framed commercial buildings stood with their OPEN banners snapping and display windows glittering.

We pulled into a parking space in front of the Chocolate Moose. This early, only a few other cars dotted the street.

“So, doggy, do you want to sit here or come in?” I asked.

The Moose was a small brick-fronted shop set between a candy store and an antiques emporium, with a big bay window looking out onto the street and a few black cast-iron chairs and café tables on the sidewalk out front.

Fala leapt from the car, then sat waiting for me on the sidewalk under the sign featuring our shop’s mascot, a googly-eyed moose with massive antlers, buck teeth, and a goofy grin.

The little silver bell over the door rang as we went inside, where we found the floor swept, the counters wiped, and the glass-fronted display case sparkling and already full of goodies. From the high tin ceiling two wide-paddled fans stirred the intoxicating aroma of chocolate morsels melting in a pan with butter.

Ellie’s blond head rose from behind the counter. “Hi. You, too, Fala-dog. Jake, I was hoping you’d get here soon. When you get settled, could you go down to the cellar?”

Danger, danger. “Uh, sure,” I said, coming around the counter for my apron. “Any particular reason?”

I knew the reason. We’d set a rat trap down there after Ellie saw something rodentlike skitter along the wall and vanish behind the water heater. She must’ve heard it snap.

Luckily, just then the little silver bell over the door jingled and Hetty Bailey bustled in, pink-cheeked and all excited about her latest cause.

“Tunnels!” she said now. “Dark, spooky, mysterious tunnels. Historical ones! Can you imagine the tourists they’ll bring?”

Hetty wore a polyester pantsuit in cooked-shrimp orange and a pair of Asics running shoes. She carried her literature—in this case, the handout was a single photocopied page entitled “Save The Tunnels!”—in a white patent-leather pocketbook, as usual.

She was perhaps the most persistent woman I’d ever met. “Now, you don’t have to give money,” she assured us in her brisk rat-a-tat voice. “Just sign the petition”—she shoved a clipboard in front of me—“we can get a committee started—”

I looked up from signing the petition. Hetty had gotten a dialysis clinic for Eastport so people didn’t have to drive 150 miles round-trip. She’d persuaded the city council to put a blinking red light on the stop sign at the foot of Washington Street, so people wouldn’t sail right on through the buildings and into the water beyond. But—

“What tunnels? I never heard of any—”

“Oh, that old story,” said Ellie. “Hetts, how did you ever get involved in—?”

“I beg to differ.” Hetty drew herself up. You could see how she got that clinic built. “My own grandfather saw them. He wrote about them, if I could only find—well, the point is, smugglers built them. Hacked them out of granite.”

I didn’t quite see how a cold, dark, stone tunnel would attract tourists, but then, I didn’t have to. Ellie gave the clipboard back after signing, and Hetty turned away satisfied.

But she stopped in the doorway. “Oh, by the way, if you go out South Meadow Road at night, watch out for the harassers.”

“Harassers? Is that like boogeymen, only they pester you?”

Hetty looked exasperatedly at me. “Smart aleck. No, it was on the news. Boys driving around on the back roads at night, coming up on people and scaring them. Menacing, the news said.”

Ellie looked over at me. News to us, that was for sure.

“They’d better catch them soon,” Hetty said, as she finished going out. “It gets to be icy in winter. You scare someone, they could slide right off the road.”

“Absolutely correct,” Ellie told her, as the little bell rang once again. Then she turned to me. “Now, about that trip to the cellar. Please, Jake.”

“What, go down there and find a little animal with a broken neck? Pick it up by the tail, maybe?”

Ellie had been a friend since almost the minute I arrived in Eastport, first blinking at the large, decrepit old house that I’d bought only a few hours after first setting foot here and then, seeing how hopeless I was at anything even halfway resembling normal life, practically moving in to it with me.

The trouble being that I’d come here straight from a luxury Manhattan apartment where if you needed a lightbulb changed, you called the building superintendent. Meanwhile the house I’d just bought needed a new roof, a new furnace, a new foundation, and a new everything else, including wiring and plumbing.

But Ellie was patient with me. “Okay,” I said now. “But you’ll have to do it sometime, you know.”

I was halfway down the cellar stairs. She peered through the doorway at me, smiling sweetly, looking like a cross between a bright fresh daisy and the nymph off the Canada Dry bottle.

“No, I won’t,” she predicted, her eyes twinkling.

And you know what? She was right.

“Here,” she said, tossing me an opened package of cheddar cheese.

With it I continued down a set of steps so narrow and winding, it was all I could do to untwist my legs at the bottom. Ducking under a pipe, easing between the boiler and the old coal bin, I ducked a. . .